Archive for August, 2013

More and more, I observe that many bright business professionals I speak with do not fully understand what Public Relations (PR) is about at its core and why it is essential to the overall positioning, awareness and credibility of any company or brand. I state this to open the opportunity to help enlighten those of you reading this who may be thinking about how a PR program can benefit your company, or perhaps, whether or not your current PR efforts are working to your organization’s fullest advantage.

While the technologies we use to communicate are continuing to evolve and change at a lighting pace, a successful PR program still relies on the same main criteria as it always has: strategy, positioning, messaging, credibility, consistency, and results. So what exactly does that all mean?

1) Strategy: this is the bedrock foundation of any successful PR program. A well-developed PR strategy will clearly define your goals, target audiences, the strategies and tactics used to achieve those goals, as well as how you will measure the results and value of your PR efforts and investments. This strategy must be clearly defined before embarking upon any type of PR program.

2) Positioning: the way in which your company, products, or leadership team is positioned in the marketplace must be able to resonate clearly and concisely above your competitors. Start by taking a look at how other companies, solutions, etc. in your space are being positioned and then define what your brand stands for and why it’s unique or superior to your competition.

3) Messaging: create compelling key messages that not only represent what you want to say, but what the recipients of those messages will want to hear, read, see and talk about. In today’s world of instant communications, putting out information and messages can be done by just about anyone, however, getting your voice heard amidst the clutter and responded to has never been more challenging.

4) Credibility: PR is all about establishing credibility for your brand among target audiences through the endorsements and validation of others who possess the type of influence that your target customers and prospects deem to be important. What others say and think about your brand is infinitely more believable than what your internal stakeholders say about your company and its offerings.

5) Consistency: the average message must be received 6-8 times in order to get the reader or viewer to take action. As such, consistency is essential to any effective PR program.

6) Results: at the end of the day, all of your efforts and hard work need to pay off in order to justify your investments in PR. The good news is that with technology, PR results can be measured more closely and accurately than they once were measured. The most important aspect of measurement is knowing what to measure and how to make sense of the data.

Having put this all out on the table, let me end with these words of wisdom, when it comes to PR, cutting corners will not yield desired results. That means formulating the right team to direct your PR program and investing in that team with the same level of importance and commitment that you would your own company.

I don’t know about you, but I see my business as child. I created it, helped it grow, and gave it everything I had to ensure that it was fully successful in meeting the challenges of adulthood. So why wouldn’t you want your business to have the best PR strategy and team in place to execute it?

I wanted to take a moment to introduce Courtney, our new Social Media Manager at Berkman Strategic Communications. At Berkman, she blends our expertise in traditional forms of strategic communications with the new and rapidly evolving world of social media. She was born the same year as the internet, and offers our clients the knowledge and skills that can only be garnered through a lifetime of exposure to the internet, four years managing businesses’ social media accounts in various capacities, and a degree from the University of San Diego.

At Berkman Strategic Communications she assists our clients by creating conversations on a variety of social media outlets and deriving leads and sales from the relationships created by those conversations. After gaining a full understanding of each client’s specific needs and goals, she carefully crafts a custom social media strategy that will create and grow over-all brand awareness, generate inbound traffic, and cultivate leads, and sales.

Each social media strategy she creates is just as unique and innovative as the client it was created for. There is no such thing as a cookie cutter strategy when it comes to social media. It is her individual focused approach that cultivates for our clients consistent long-term social media success.

Regardless of whether they already have an established social media presence or are starting from scratch, she builds our clients’ audiences, and communicates to those audiences what it is about each client’s brand that makes it special and unique. Through posts, conversations, and commentary she communicates what problems our client can solve for their social media followers and how our client can make their audience’s lives better.

Social media is a constantly evolving and growing PR platform, and through creativity, education, and intuition she ensures that each one of Berkman’s clients is ahead of the curve.

Let me know if establishing and growing your social media presence is something that sounds good to you… because I know just the person!